Late last night (CET), we reported on the story that the VLC project needed more developers for the Mac version of this popular video player, or else the Mac variant may disappear. Just about every website out there reported on this issue, but it turns out it all got a bit exaggerated (on the internet? Surely you jest...). We spoke to VLC developer Pierre d'Herbemont to clarify the issue, and they've also put up a wiki page about the so-called demise of the Mac version of VLC. He also detailed what, exactly, they meant by "Apple is blocking us".

You can talk about nicely written code etc etc, but delivering something which works on time is what gets the bills paid. Sometimes you gotta bodge and hack to get stuff to work when time limits are tight.

I beg to differ. Sometimes, you have to work like that. But don't forget that this kind of behavior is the main cause that ITC has such a bad reputation delivering products that are not ready for the users. After all, producing only "good enough" products is also a main factor that we learned to live with bad and clunky user interfaces. Sometimes, you just need somebody like e. g. Apple that does is more or less "right" and not just "good enough".

I'm glad that there are developers that think further than just looking at code and features. At the end, products live or die having user acceptance. And you don't get user acceptance just with features because users will see those features through the user interface. Having a bad UI for a cool feature is wasting development resources: the feature should have been skipped right from the beginning ..